Liberal secularism is the answer to combatting terrorism

New grounds for deporting and excluding people from the UK - including fostering hatred or, advocating and justifying violence to further beliefs. The powers will cover statements already on record. Consultation on the plans will finish this month.

Implied in many of the measures is that multiculturalism has failed, and that the "National Security State" must be a unitary nation-state with one culture, one central government; and one purpose - security. Australian commentators have led the attack on multiculturalism, seeing secular liberalism as the feeding and breeding ground for terrorism. This rabid rhetoric is used as an excuse to establish the unitary "National Security State", Miranda Devine writes:

Kowtowing to the unreasonable demands of intolerant minorities trying to impose their will on the majority is not going to safeguard Australia from "fanatical religious hate, exclusion, death and terror", as Parker seems to think. Quite the opposite.

Concepts of tolerance, freedom and loving one's neighbour as oneself don't exist in a vacuum, any more than "ethics" exist without a moral framework.

Trying to erase the long-established culture of Australia, permanently rooted as it is in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and replacing it with vapid, secularist nothingness is not going to help. It simply creates a vacuum for radical Islam to rush in and fill.

This is authoritarian anti-liberal nonsense at its absolute worst. Devine's advocacy for one culture and one nation fail, simply because her vision of what constitutes a viable society, culture and nation cannot be achieved without government intervention. Lack of liberty is an unnatural state for a society and requires high energy and cost by the government to enforce. This is why autocracies are doomed to inevitable failure, the more liberties that are taken, the higher the cost to the society and the more energy that is dissipated in maintaining authoritarianism.

Defeating extremism

Multiculturalism is a natural outgrowth of liberty. A monoculture can only be enforced through the coercion of the government. This comes at a cost; the reduction of civil liberties, discrimination against diversity, an intolerance for dissent and the increase in the shadow state as all authority collapses into the central government. These would place Australia closer to components that make failed states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran such hotbeds for extremist ideology.

The answer to terrorism in Australia is the secular liberalism of Australian republicanism. Maximum liberty, tempered by individual rights and bound by inclusive and responsive minimal government is the best means to defeat terrorism and the environment that breeds and amplifies extremism.